The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to planning system and method and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to system and method of planning and managing a travel plan.
During the last years, business, local and international tourism has become one of the most thriving markets. World travel market reached 930 million tourists crossing between nations in 2007, according to the world tourism organization (WTO) reports. This market growth may be reflected by the booming internet tourism activity with more than 250 million unique monthly travel web site visitors.
A travel or a trip is part of an end to end scenario which involves pre travel activities, travel activities, and post travel activities. Pre travel activities include activities such as selecting a destiny and planning travel activities. Travel activities include activities such as commuting, site seeing, dinning, lodging, shopping, and other travelling activities. Post travel activities includes activities such as arranging and developing images and videos, ordering photo album, acquiring value added tax (V.A.T) refunds and the like.
These travel activities are all related to purpose of the trip, to the execution of the trip which may be described as a schedule and route, to travel events that influence them and are tied together to a scenario of context between the combination of activities and between themselves.
For the common traveler, planning travel activities may be performed months before the travel activities and/or few hours or moments before starting the travel activities. OTTI, the U.S.A. government Office of Travel and Tourism, statistics indicate a traveler's planning duration of 100 days average and 60 days median before travel date. On the other hand, some travelers plan on the last minute so as to enjoy last minute travel tariffs and/or low cost deals for weekend vacations and/or urgent unexpected business travels. The invested planning effort moves from weeks to hours depending on trip length and the planning methodology.
Various websites provide travel planning assisting solutions. These websites include solutions for managing corporate travel reservation and expenses such as Rearden Commerce Inc. and getthere.com or itineraries creation sites such as HomeAndAbroad.com, Tripwiser.com, Travelmuse.com, tripit.com and dopplr.com. Typically the provided planning solutions require the user to provide a profile defined by a trip style, a trip theme, a trip characteristics list, a destination and/or travel period. Then the user selects points of interest (POI) and/or services and adds them to the itinerary.
For example, U.S Patent Application No. 2008/0046298 filed on Jan. 29, 2007 methods, systems and computer readable code for travel planning. The system includes a travel planning engine that schedules a plurality of activities within one or more time intervals and generates a travel plan, where each activity is associated with a physical location and optional time parameters. Alternatively or additionally, the travel planning is implemented by receiving manual travel planning directives through a user interface. The activities may be scheduled to satisfy specific constraints and/or travel benefit parameters. The travel plan may include information about traveling between relevant locations. The document further describes a method of comparing and/or presenting a plurality of travel options, wherein each travel option is associated with a respective mode of transportation and a method for customizing a travel itinerary for a traveler.
Another example is described in U.S Patent Application Pub. No. 2007/0143156, filed on Jun. 21, 2007 that describes a method and a website for making travel plans between an originating location and a destination that may be at least partially determined by weather criteria, travel time and cost, and preselected activities that may exist at the destination during the time period in which a trip is to be made.